


The 3am Job

by Liethe



Category: Leverage
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-22
Updated: 2014-07-20
Packaged: 2018-02-09 17:28:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 11,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1991550
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Liethe/pseuds/Liethe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Parker and Hardison embark on what might be the most important con of their lives. They're going to steal an Eliot.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Eliot

So here's how it happened.

Eliot loved his team. He'd always been good at what he did, even when what he did wasn't so good. Now that he finally had the chance to _do_  good, he was even better. Not everyone realised how difficult it was to do what he did, or how much work he put into it. How hard could it be to take a bullet for someone? How hard was it, really, to dispose of anyone who asked too many questions, or who got in the wrong place at the wrong time?

In a way, they were right. It was easy enough to kill a person; people were very fragile, really. What made Eliot special was the people he _didn't_ kill. Everyone thought that the thing which made him different was that he could take the pain, take the punishment, and outlast anyone. They were wrong. It wasn't his endurance which made him special. He didn't take what he did because he could. He _made_ himself strong enough to take anything, because knowing that he could take the hit, take the pain, was what made him able to take his time in a fight, and choose his hits carefully.

Other hitters put in their hours on the firing range, learning how to take a man down with one shot, take him down and keep him down. Eliot skipped the firing range altogether, since even the best marksman can never guarantee that a shot won't be lethal. That was why he didn't like guns. Instead, he spent his time practising hand to hand, or with his knives, learning how to put someone down for just long enough to get the job done. He learned how to hit someone so that they _did_ get up again. He'd killed a lot of people, but it was a long time since he'd killed anyone when it wasn't utterly necessary.

A lot of people hadn't appreciated Eliot for that. Quite the opposite. Why spend three minutes fighting a guy, when a bullet could down him in a second? Especially when you spent those three minutes getting beaten to a pulp. Seconds counted, on the job, and you couldn't afford to get injured, not when everyone else was relying on you to get them out in one piece. Letting some guy smack you around long enough to take the right shot – the shot that would incapacitate, but not kill – that simply wasn't something a hitter could get away with. Not if he wanted to keep working.

That was why he trained so hard. That was why he never slept for more than a couple of hours a night, so he always had time to practice, to perfect his art. The only way anyone would take him on for a job was if he was the best; if Eliot Spencer was so much better than anyone else, that simply having him on a team made most of the obstacles in your path run away, and the rest of them try to hire him out from under you.

He'd saved a lot of lives that way. Lives that any other hitter would have written off as collateral damage. He knew it would never be enough to atone for the other things he'd done, but it mattered. It made a difference, and if he had to strive, and fight, and push himself to the limit every day, for the privilege of being able to make those decisions, and save those lives, he would, and he'd ignore the way everyone else in his line of work looked down on him for it.

Eliot loved his team, because he knew that the thing which made him different from every other hitter out there was the reason that _he_ was on this team, not anyone else. Finally, he was working for – working with – people who would work just as hard as he did to avoid leaving any innocent bodies behind them. He was doing good things, with good people, and he loved them for that. He knew that one of these days he would probably die for this team, for this war they'd started, and he'd made his peace with that. He couldn't imagine ever wanting to be anywhere but at their sides, no matter what was coming at them.

He loved them both, but the same compulsion that made him throw himself between them and danger would never allow him to put himself between Parker and Alec. They needed each other, and he needed them, both of them, to be happy. He needed that more than he needed them to be his. More than he needed to be theirs. So he loved them in the only way he knew how, until each blow he took for them became a caress, each drop of blood he shed, a promise.

Tonight, he sat alone on the sofa in the office, after a job which hadn't gone as well as it should, a job which had left him bruised and heart-sore. It was always harder when it was children. It had been easier when Nate had been there, to hide how deeply these particular cases affected him. Everyone had been so aware of how Nate was hurting, that they'd never even seen him. That was how he preferred it. But Nate was gone, and Sophie too, and he'd seen how careful Alec and Parker had been around him during this job. He hated that they'd seen his weakness; hated even more the feeling that he'd failed them. He was supposed to protect them, not the other way round.

He clenched his hands into fists, feeling the ache as the skin pulled tight over bruised knuckles. He'd seen plenty of action this last week. He always did when the jobs went south. Maybe he'd taken one too many blows to the head, or maybe it was one too few. Either way, despite the punishment he'd taken, he still didn't feel that release, that calm he usually felt when the violence was done and it was time to go home and nurse his wounds, as if his demons had been exorcised, if only for a short while.

His body was a palette of colour; the purple-black of fresh bruising, and the mottled greens and yellows of the ones which had almost healed. The pink of raw flesh, the white of the stitches which held it together, and the brown of dried blood. His mind though, that was monochrome. In his mind, everything was red.

No amount of money stolen or vengeance taken could return a lost childhood. That was something they all knew. That was the thing which made these jobs the hardest, because by the time anyone called them, it was already too late. The mark was humiliated and penniless now, and he wouldn't hurt anyone else, but it still didn't fix anything.

He sat on the sofa listening to Hardison and Parker move around the apartment, unable to keep from noticing the way their paths intersected more than could be put down to chance. He wondered if they had ever considered how little privacy they had with him around. He tried, but however safe he felt, he couldn't switch off his constant awareness of the space – and the people – around him. Did they know?

They probably did. Alec and Parker were a lot of things, but stupid wasn't one of them. Of course, if they wanted privacy, they could just leave; they all still had their own places, even if they just slept here most nights. They could leave, but he knew that tonight they wouldn't. After a job like this, they needed to be together, even if none of them would say it.

He was grateful for that tonight. It was their presence that kept him here, sat with a stillness which spoke of tension, not rest. A stillness broken only by the constant, reflexive, clenching of his fists. Without Parker and Hardison, would he have the strength to stay sitting there? The strength to contain those dark whispers in his mind, the ones which said that money wasn't enough? There was a part of him that believed, truly believed, that the mark owed his life for what he'd done, and never mind that his death wouldn't help the people he'd hurt. Never mind that if anything happened to him, suspicion would fall first on his victims, who had been through enough without being investigated for murder. If Eliot let himself think about what that man had done, he would be consumed with the need to end him, and so instead, he just listened.

He heard Parker open the fridge, heard the hiss as she opened one of Hardison's bottles of soda, and the faint intake of breath as she sniffed it. He couldn't see the face she made, but he knew it would be there, and pictured it in his mind's eye, holding her image up as a talisman to ward off the darker thoughts which threatened to overwhelm him. He didn't know why she insisted on smelling it each time she opened a bottle, when she knew that she hated it, but that was Parker for you.

He heard her pad over to Alec on almost-silent feet; heard him jump as she appeared beside him. Something else which never changed. It never failed to amaze him that someone who was so connected to the world around him in some ways – most of them involving his computer – could be so oblivious in others. Genius hacker or not, Eliot was sometimes surprised that Hardison had ever survived on his own.

The rustle of a bag, and then a crunch. They were eating pretzels. It was a very distinctive sound, and no one knew that more than Eliot, who'd had plenty of opportunity to study it. The sheer volume of pretzels they got through would have seemed impossible to anyone who hadn't seen just how much chocolate Parker could put away in a sitting, or how many bottles of orange soda Hardison could drink in a day.

After a moment, they came and joined him. Alec sat on his left, and Parker on his right, putting the bag of pretzels on the table in front of him as she sat. It was late, and they were all tired, but he could feel the tension in each of them which said that they couldn't sleep yet. They watched one film, and then another, all of them staring intently at the screen, though Eliot had to wonder if any of them were really watching it, or if, like him, Parker and Alec were just trying to banish the last thoughts of the job from their minds.

Gradually, he felt the tension drain from them, and by the time the huge bag of pretzels was empty, Parker was nodding off against his shoulder. When the film finished, Hardison carried Parker off to the room they shared, and after a last sweep of the place, Eliot turned off the lights and went to his own room, just down the hallway from theirs.

He stripped off his shirt, sighing as he noticed the rain of pretzel crumbs which fell to the floor. He hadn't even eaten a single one of the damn things, and he was still covered in them. Not for the first time he muttered to himself that it was lucky Parker never ate on the job. The girl was such a messy eater, she'd set off motion sensors with drips of ice cream, and leave the authorities a trail of breadcrumbs right back to her safe house at the end of a job.

Eliot knew the significance of the pretzels; that was why he didn't eat any. Hardison, being a true child of the computer age, didn't seem to understand the concept of privacy, or at least that was the only possible explanation for why he was almost never off comms. Not even during some conversations that any sane person would consider very private. Hardison even slept with his earbud still in. And Eliot? Eliot listened. He fell asleep to the comforting sound of Hardison's breathing. Parker's, too, on those nights when they slept with their heads close enough together that Hardison's mic picked them both up.

It was the sound of security, the sound that told Eliot that his team was alive, was well, and it was safe for him to sleep. There had been times, times when something had gone wrong, or he'd been up against a force greater than him, and he'd been helpless. Drugged, like that time in Dubai, or simply beaten down, the way he'd been on the carnival job. Times when he'd woken from unconsciousness and hadn't been able to breathe until he knew that his team hadn't died while he lay sleeping.

After he'd turned the lights out, Eliot lay in bed and listened as Alec's breathing finally fell into the deep, easy, rhythm which said that he was asleep. He forced himself to match his own breathing with Alec's, and finally, he fell asleep.

Sometime during the night, his earbud went silent.

Eliot was out of bed and down the hall, standing in the open door of the other bedroom before he'd even known he was awake. Hardison hadn't woken at the sound of the door opening. Eliot saw that as a victory – that Alec had never needed to learn to sleep lightly, with Eliot to keep him safe – even as he shook his head at the deep, trusting sleep which was so foreign to him. He could just see Alec's chest rise and fall in the dim light which filtered in from the street, and the sight calmed the sick adrenalin which fizzed in his stomach like he'd swallowed lithium.

Parker woke, of course. She climbed out of bed, as heedless as ever of her own nakedness. She couldn't have known why he was there, but she seemed to know what he needed, regardless. She stalked up to him, slowly, so as not to startle him, and when she was within arm's reach he raised his hand to cup her face, feeling the reassuring warmth of her skin, her breath on his palm. She put her hand over his, and – feeling him relax – used that point of contact to lead him towards the bed.

“I can't,” he whispered, pulling away slightly, but Parker only shushed him, and kept inching back towards the bed. His arm stretched out between them, until he had to either follow her or let her go. He followed.

When they stopped beside the bed, she laid her free hand on his chest, applying just enough pressure to tell him she wanted him to sit, but not enough to wake pain in the bruises there.

“Sit,” she whispered, when he didn't take the hint, but he shook his head, casting a glance over his shoulder to where Alec still slept, curled up on the other side of the bed.

“Sit,” she said again, louder this time. Alec stirred, but didn't wake. Eliot gave in. It was a large bed, and there was plenty of space for him to sit without disturbing the sleeping man. It would, Eliot reasoned, disturb him more to wake up and find a shadowed figure standing beside the bed. Kinder to leave him sleeping.

Parker eventually coaxed him until he lay in the warmth she had left behind. He was careful to lie so that there was plenty of space between himself and Alec, but that meant that when Parker joined him, she had to snuggle right up to him to avoid falling out of the bed.

She was so warm with her back pressed against his chest, and he ducked his head until his nose was in her hair, breathing in the scent of her, letting it drive away the last vestiges of the terror he'd felt, waking to sudden silence. It would be so easy to fall asleep here beside her, but he couldn't let himself.

“I should go.” He said finally.

“Why?” Her voice when she spoke was soft, dreamlike, as if she was as close to sleep as he had been. He marvelled that anyone who knew some of the things he'd done could be so relaxed, lying next to him in the dark.

“When Alec wakes up...” he said, and then cursed himself. He tried never to use Hardison's first name. It felt too familiar, too intimate, especially now. Eliot's hand found its way to Parker's hip, intending to roll her away from him, but before he could, another hand covered his, and there was another warm body pressed against him.

“ _When_  Alec wakes up?” Came a sleepy voice from behind him. Eliot started. How had he not even realised that Hardison was awake? He was so used to the constant whisper of breath in his ear that without it he felt cut off. For so long he had been able to rely on the rhythm of Hardison's breathing to tell him so much – whether the hacker was awake or asleep, happy, sad or frustrated, that he'd lost touch with the other cues which should have alerted him when Alec woke up.

“You think I don't wake up when Parker invites some guy into bed with me? You're heavy, man, no way I ain't waking up when the bed practically collapses under you.”

“Some guy?” Eliot snaps, “and I ain't that heavy.” The retort is automatic, but it comes out sounding more confused than gruff.

“Besides,” Parker chimes in, sounding vaguely insulted “it's not like I'd do this without Alec knowing about it. I know better than that.”

“You do  _now_ , “ Hardison mutters under his breath.

“Not all surprises are good,” Parker says, sounding like she's reciting something she's learned by rote.

“Well,” Eliot said, increasingly uncomfortable at the situation, “that sounds like my cue to leave.” Except that Alec's arm was still over his, still holding him between the two of them, and Eliot couldn't quite bring himself to move it.

“Not all surprises are bad, either,” Alec said softly. “You don't have to go.”

“You knew Parker was planning this?” Eliot asked.

“We both planned this. You think I wear that damn earbud all the time for my health? You snore, you know.” Eliot didn't bother trying to deny it. Get your nose broken enough times and certain things become inevitable. That was one of the many reasons he always slept alone.

“So why do you wear it?” He asked

“You know the only time I've ever woken up before you? It was after the Iowa job. Remember?” Eliot bristled. He did remember, and it wasn't a fond memory.

“I remember that I had a knife wound in my gut, and three broken ribs, and I hadn't slept in over 72 hours. I think I'm entitled to a little sleep after that.”

“Woah! Hey, not a dig, man. I'm just saying. We were all worn out after that job, and I forgot to take my comms out. I don't take them out much anyway, but I never used to sleep in them. That was the first time. And you slept for eight whole hours, like a normal person.”

“I still don't see what that has to do with anything.”

“The minute he took his earbud out,” Parker said softly, “you woke up.” Now that Eliot thought about it, that was the first time he'd slept with his earbud in. He'd stopped taking it out after that, and never let himself look too closely at why.

“So, you guys planned this? Lured me into your bed in the middle of the night, and for what? Huh? Why am I here? I don't like being manipulated.” There was an edge in his voice, and he didn't care. He trusted these two, trusted them in a way he'd never trusted Nate or Sophie, even as he'd put his life in their hands time and again. He'd trusted Nate to keep him alive, but it was Parker and Alec he trusted to keep him safe.

For a given value of safe. What was a few bullets between friends, anyway? They kept him safe in the ways that really mattered. Or they had, until now.

“I'm sorry,” Parker said, “it was my idea to get you here. There are things I wanted to say, but they were all impossible things. Things too fragile to let out in the daylight.”

“Sometimes it's easier to talk like this, curled up in the dark as though everything is a dream, and nothing can hurt you.” Hardison continued.

“But you can leave if you want,” Parker said, “if you don't want to be here... if you don't feel safe... you don't have to stay.” The words were so quiet that he barely picked them out, even with her head tucked up under his chin.

Eliot didn't leave. He didn't know what to say, so he didn't say anything, but he didn't leave. They were right. Things did feel less real, surrounded by skin and breath and the soft press of silence. Maybe that could cushion him against whatever they had to say. Whatever it was, he had to know now. If he left, he would drive himself mad with wondering.

After a few moments, they seemed to take his silence as assent. Eliot heard Alec take a deep breath, holding it for a moment before speaking.

“We've been talking a lot about... things,” he said, “and we've wondered for a while whether you... well, whether we...” he trailed off.

“We've had an idea for a while that you might rather be here,” Parker continued, patting the bed beside them, “than where you were, but we didn't know how to ask. We didn't want you to feel like you didn't have a choice.”

“We need you to know how important you are to us,” Alec said, picking up where Parker left off, in a way that was starting to feel like this was a conversation that they'd maybe rehearsed a few times before tonight, “we want you with us, in this team. We're friends before anything, and nothing is going to change that.”

He paused for a moment, and Eliot didn't know how he could bear it if they carried on, so he spoke up.

“She threw a crowbar at my head,” he said, trying for levity, “if I stuck around after that, then you're not getting rid of me that easily.” The attempt at humour fell flat, words dropping like stones into the stillness of the room. Eliot felt the kick of Alec's diaphragm against his back as he laughed, a beat too late to be genuine.

“We love you,” Parker said out of nowhere, and Eliot wasn't sure whether she was ignoring the way he'd tried to move the conversation to safer territory, or whether she had simply not noticed. You never could be sure with Parker. “We love you, and that's ours. We get that. We can love you, and it doesn't have to change anything. You don't even have to love us back. Love is just a thing. It's just...” Parker gave a sigh of frustration. That particular sigh which said that she was feeling something that she simply didn't have the vocabulary to express. It was a sigh that often did more than words ever could to express the inexpressible.

“What she's trying to say is that love is a great thing, but when it comes with expectations, people get hurt, and we don't want to hurt you. So no expectations, no demands. You can get up and walk away and never see us again, and we won't try to stop you. It's your choice. Or you can go back to your bed and go to sleep, and we'll never have to talk about this again. Things can be the way they always have. Us loving you won't change that.”

“How do you know it won't?”

“Because we've loved you for a long time, man, and it hasn't changed things yet.”

“And what if I don't?” Eliot didn't recognise his voice as he spoke.

“Don't what?”

“Walk away.”

 


	2. Parker

So here's how it happened.

Parker loved her team. She'd loved them for longer than she'd truly understood what that meant. She'd loved them even back when she'd known she couldn't love, couldn't be loved. Even back when she'd known that love was for real families, who lived in real houses. Not girls who lived in warehouses full of motion sensors and lasers. Girls who had to pick the lock on the freezer just to get an ice cream.

Hardison had been easy to love, relatively speaking. As easy to love as anything with a real heart could be. Anything which could bleed, or die, or just walk away. So, not easy, really. But it had been easy to get used to the hugs, easy to get used to being held, to holding something warm and alive and breathing, something which could hold her back. Her stuffed bunny had been the only thing that she'd trusted to always be there when she needed something to hold on to, and then, all of a sudden, he wasn't the only one any more.

Alec was easy to hug. He was even easier to kiss; easier to manoeuvre into situations where she had to kiss him, but it was like picking the lock on an empty safe. The moves were the same, but at the end, you walked away with nothing, wondering why you'd bothered.

Gradually, she started to recognise that he wasn't what was empty. He was full, and just waiting to be cracked. The locks she was having difficulty with were the ones around her own heart.

Then one day, the tumblers fell into place. Everything was wonderful, really it was, and it was all so new that it took her a while to realise that she was still  _her_. Falling in love didn't make her normal. No blue fairy was going to come and turn her into a real girl.

They didn't hold hands when they walked down the street, because she didn't like to feel restricted. When they slept together, it was at his apartment, or their room at the offices. They never went back to her warehouse, and she didn't know if it was because he wasn't comfortable there, or because she wasn't comfortable having him there. She knew it was more likely to be both, than neither.

She loved him, but he talked. A lot. And mostly she was interested, but sometimes she was tired, or bored, or just wanted to think about something else. She knew enough by then to know that they didn't have to share every interest, and plenty of people only pretended to listen sometimes when people they loved were talking. But other people knew how to make their faces do that listening thing, even when they weren't paying attention. She didn't.

She liked quiet, and stillness, and being alone. She liked hanging in mid-air in the darkness for hours. She liked stealing. He liked noise and crowds, and actually paying for things when they went shopping.

It wasn't that she didn't love him, because she did. But every time she watched a stupid romantic film, trying to figure out how all this stuff worked, she got more and more uncomfortable. The characters would say things like “you're my everything”, or “I'm not complete without you,” and she'd know that she could never feel that way. The thought that _Alec_ might made her feel trapped and panicky. She didn't want to be everything to anyone. She didn't think she could.

But despite all that, Hardison was the easy one. She didn't think much about her feelings for Eliot, not for a long time, not while everything was still so new and terrifying with Alec. She didn't think about him, in the same way that you can't start breaking into the vault in the basement until you've finished cracking the security system on the front door.

By the time she realised what she wanted, it was almost impossible to talk about it. Night-times were when she and Alec talked, in those floating moments before sleep when it felt safe to say anything. But then she realised that she wanted something more; she realised that she wanted something she couldn't just steal, something she couldn't have without talking to Alec about it first, and by the time she realised all that, Alec had taken to wearing his earbud while he slept – with Parker's encouragement – because they were a team, and she hadn't thought she would ever have a secret that she would need to share with just one of them and not the other.

In the end, they talked in the shower. No amount of tinkering had ever been able to make the earbuds withstand water, so it was safe there. It wasn't as bad as she thought; with the sound of the water muffling her words, and Alec just a silhouette against the shower curtain, it was almost as easy to talk as it was in bed, at night.

It was lucky, really, that Hardison had the building set up so that none of the utility companies noticed they were there, otherwise she would have had to steal some very nice paintings just to pay the water bill that month. It took a lot of showers, and a lot of talking, before they had an agreement. Even more before they had a plan. Parker had foolishly thought it would be easier, now that she'd done this once. She couldn't begin to understand why two plus one was so much more complicated than one plus one, but the arithmetic of the heart never had made much sense to her.

And then they had the plan, but it never seemed like the right time. Not until tonight, when she'd spent all week on a job which had Eliot flinching at his own shadow. She'd tried so hard to make this an easier job for him, minimising his time with the mark, that she'd over-complicated the plan and everything had almost fallen apart. As always, Eliot had taken the brunt of it, and she'd heard every blow he took and known that she was responsible.

She'd fallen asleep afterwards, tucked safely against his chest, and when it was time to go to bed she hadn't wanted to leave him. She'd given Alec the sign before they turned the lights out, and sat awake in bed, waiting for her boys to fall asleep so that she could put her plan into action.

But now it was all going wrong, the way the job had. It had started out okay. Eliot was here with them, just the way she'd planned, but that was the problem. It was all going wrong  _because_  she'd planned it, just like she planned cons, because that was the only way she knew to deal with anything too scary or too complicated to ad-lib. But you don' t con your crew. She'd screwed up, and she didn't know how to fix it.

“So, you guys planned this? Lured me into your bed in the middle of the night, and for what? Huh? Why am I here? I don't like being manipulated.” She heard the accusation in Eliot's voice, and knew she deserved it.

“I'm sorry,” she said, struggling to get the words out past the shame which had closed around her throat like a fist, “it was my idea to get you here. There are things I wanted to say, but they were all impossible things. Things too fragile to let out in the daylight.”

“Sometimes it's easier to talk like this, curled up in the dark as though everything is a dream, and nothing can hurt you.” Alec said, and she heard in his voice that he was trying, trying to fix what she'd broken. She was so tired of this; tired of getting things wrong and Alec having to fix it, like she was an alien from one of those shows he watched, and he was having to translate what she said into human. She couldn't listen to that any more, so she spoke again, cutting him off.

“But you can leave if you want, if you don't want to be here... if you don't feel safe... you don't have to stay.” The words  _'with me'_  hung unsaid on the end of each sentence; if you don't want to be here  _with me._  If you don't feel safe  _with me..._

You don't con your own team.

She couldn't carry on, and Eliot didn't respond. He didn't leave either. She was just starting to feel as though maybe there was hope, maybe she hadn't broken them beyond repair, when Alec started speaking again.

“We've been talking a lot about... things,” he said, “and we've wondered for a while whether you... well, whether we...” he trailed off. She wondered about that 'we'. It hadn't been 'we', not at the start. She didn't think he realised it, but Alec was terribly attached to the idea of normal. He might never want to retire, and get a house in the suburbs, and a white picket fence, but he needed to know that he could. Parker herself might have been far from normal, but she could see that their relationship had a significance to him beyond the love they shared. It was a significance that came with being part of a couple, having something he'd been told all his life he should want but would probably never get.

She worried about that sometimes. She hoped that if this crazy plan of hers came together that Alec would find something in it that was worth giving up his little slice of normal for.

“We've had an idea for a while that you might rather be here than where you were, but we didn't know how to ask. We didn't want you to feel like you didn't have a choice.” she said, cutting off that train of thought. She said 'we', because Alec had said it first, so it must be the right thing to say.

He'd said that the thing about having a choice was the right thing to say as well, so she trusted that, even if she wasn't sure that any of them had a choice. She hadn't chosen to feel this way, hadn't chosen to feel at all. She certainly hadn't chosen to feel so strongly that conversations as difficult as this one became the easier option, when compared with trying to ignore how much she loved both the men in the bed with her. She also knew that Eliot didn't have a choice about whether he loved them or not. You couldn't make love happen, or make it stop. You could only decide what to do about it when you had it.

“We need you to know how important you are to us,” Alec said, saying the words they'd agreed on, no more, no less. “We want you with us, in this team. We're friends before anything, and nothing is going to change that.”

“She threw a crowbar at my head,” Eliot said. “If I stuck around after that, then you're not getting rid of me that easily.” It wasn't funny, and she almost jumped a moment later when Alec laughed. It wasn't funny, but she could hear in Eliot's voice that he was trying. She didn't know what he was trying to do, but he sounded almost normal again. The note of betrayal was gone from his voice, and so she smiled, even though the joke wasn't funny.

“We love you,” she said, going completely off script. She couldn't help it. She could tell how close she had come to losing Eliot altogether, because she was different, and stupid when it came to talking about feelings, and sometimes she missed things like the way that her safe place to speak might not feel safe for everyone. No matter how many times Alec told her that people don't always like surprises, she still sometimes forgot.

“We love you, and that's ours. We get that. We can love you, and it doesn't have to change anything. You don't even have to love us back. Love is just a thing. It's just...” She sighed. She didn't know how to say what she needed to. She didn't know how to say that she wasn't like the girls in the films. She wouldn't run through airports calling his name, and she wouldn't expect him to change his life because of what she was feeling. She had to tell him how she felt, because it felt too much like lying not to, but she wished she knew how to say that she didn't think that love should be a cage. She didn't think he owed her anything. Not a relationship, not fidelity, not reciprocation. She just loved him.

“What she's trying to say is that love is a great thing, but when it comes with expectations, people get hurt, and we don't want to hurt you. So no expectations, no demands. You can get up and walk away and never see us again, and we won't try to stop you. It's your choice. Or you can go back to your bed and go to sleep, and we'll never have to talk about this again. Things can be the way they always have. Us loving you won't change that.”

“How do you know it won't?”

“Because we've loved you for a long time, man, and it hasn't changed things yet.”

“And what if I don't?” Parker held her breath. _Was he saying what she thought he was saying?_

“Don't what?”

“Walk away."

 


	3. Alec

So here's how it happened.

Alec loved his team. They were more than a team to him, and they had been for a long time. He knew they all felt it, even if he'd been the first one to say it. Each time a job had gone really wrong, and they'd had to scatter for a while, it got harder. This had been a rough one, and there had been moments when they'd all looked at each other, and known that this might be one of those times where they should separate. He'd seen in those looks that he wasn't the only one thinking that 'should' could go to hell – whatever came they would fight it together, because he wasn't leaving them again.

In the end, it hadn't gone that badly, but it had still been more than bad enough. They'd all known, since Belgrade, that Parker didn't always act rationally on certain jobs; jobs which reminded her of her past. She was a lot better now, but he still saw that look in her eyes sometimes, that battle between fight or flight, the desire to prevent her own story from repeating warring with the knowledge that she could never save everyone, and it hurt too much to even try.

This had been the first job like that since Nate and Sophie had left, and Alec knew that she'd been dealing – or not dealing – with her panic by deflecting it all onto Eliot. Not that Eliot wasn't all kinds of messed up in his own way, but he didn't need the kid-gloves treatment that Parker had given him. A good thing too, since it had wound up having the opposite effect, as the plan unravelled around them, and they'd had to pull out all the stops just to get the job done, holding it together by the skin of their teeth.

The job was done, and they were back home – in the offices that more and more he was starting to think of as home. Something still wasn't right though; they were all still on edge, and he could feel the tension in the air. Eliot was just sitting on the sofa, in perfect silence, but Alec could see the muscles jump in his cheeks as he clenched his jaw. Parker was even more restless than usual, flitting about the room, unable to settle. From the way her eyes kept straying to Eliot, he had a good idea of what she was thinking.

He took the soda she gave him, and the kiss that came with it, and lead her over to the sofa. If she was thinking what he thought she might be, well, then he had some thinking of his own to do. He put on a film that was gentle and light-hearted, just the sort of thing you needed after a job like this. It also happened to be a film he knew well enough to recite from memory, so he didn't need to pay much attention to it.

Instead, his attention was mostly fixed on Eliot. He sat on one side of the hitter, Parker on the other, and it seemed like the most natural thing in the world to reach across Eliot's lap to take Parker's hand, to lean in slightly, so that just the tiniest bit of his weight was against Eliot's shoulder. Where the bare skin of their arms touched, the other man's skin was hot, like a furnace. Alec felt the heat sink into him, and thought about how comfortable he was, and how uncomfortable  _ _that__  was.

He concentrated of the sensation of skin against his and tried to work out what the hell he was feeling. He sent out questions, like pulses of sonar, trying to discern the exact shape of the mass of emotion in his chest. There was love there, yes. It had been surprisingly easy to admit that he loved Eliot, but then, they were family.

The question was, what did he want to do with that love? They'd been friends, partners in crime, and occasionally brothers-in-arms. Did he want something more?

There was love there, but also fear, and the fear was a great jagged thing. He felt as though if he breathed too deeply it would cut him up inside. He knew what Parker wanted, and he also knew how pointless it was to stand between Parker and something she had her eye on. If Eliot wanted her back... well, he knew that he wouldn't stand in their way. He loved Parker, but that didn't make her belong to him. He would just have to learn to live with the fear; fear that they would both leave him, that he would be left out, or even just that he wouldn't be able to deal with the knowledge that they were together.

And then there was the other fear. He had no intention of labelling himself; people were more complicated than computers, and no matter how many directories and subdirectories you made, there would always be outlying pieces of data, files that wouldn't fit. He guessed that he was just one of those anomalies. But he knew that some folks liked their labels, and more worryingly, hated other people's. He didn't think Eliot was a bigot, but he still wasn't entirely sure how the hitter would react to a declaration of love. Ex-military types had some weird hangups, sometimes. That whole 'don't ask, don't tell' thing had a lot to answer for.

He'd confessed to Parker that he didn't have the first clue how to go about this. It had been difficult, since she still expected him to be some kind of oracle of interpersonal relationships. It showed how much she still had to learn that she could view a novice like himself as an expert. It hadn't been easy, admitting to Parker that he still wasn't completely confident he knew what he was doing with her body, and adding a whole other person into the mix just made everything twice as complicated.

She'd laughed. He was more or less used to Parker laughing at him now, so it hadn't really bothered him. He supposed she had a point; Eliot was a guy, and so was he, so he really ought to know his way around the territory. She'd told him to go watch some gay porn, and hadn't that just been the oddest experience? Porn was supposed to be illicit; having it handed out like homework, and by his girlfriend, no less, was just downright unsettling, especially when she expected him to report back afterwards.

He wasn't really sure it had helped. In the same way that straight porn didn't really resemble anything he and Parker did together, it was hard to imagine himself and Eliot doing any of the things he'd seen – things which seemed more like feats of athletics than anything which might actually be fun to do. He could picture himself kissing Eliot though, could imagine the feel of Eliot's body under his hands. Maybe everything else would just work itself out.

These were awkward thoughts to have, sitting beside Eliot on the sofa. They were even closer now, close enough that Eliot's hair brushed his neck. Parker had drawn them in, pulling his hand further over towards her so that he had to lean against Eliot more and more. Eliot hadn't seemed to mind as she lay her head on his chest. Alec shifted awkwardly where he sat and tried to think of other things.

At the start, he'd told Parker that if this was what she needed, then it was fine by him. He'd meant it too. If Arwen could give up immortality to be with Aragorn, then he was sure he could handle sharing Parker, if that was truly what she needed. More and more though, he'd stopped thinking of this as a sacrifice he was making for her, and started to realise it was something he wanted for himself. The sex was going to be complicated and messy and confusing, he was sure, but wasn't it always? It wasn't all about the sex. He wanted to stop fighting the closeness which had sprung up between them, wanted to banish the last boundaries between them, the ones which would only let Eliot hug him if he pushed him away afterwards. He didn't want Eliot to have to keep pushing away that comfort, and he didn't want to keep being pushed away.

Carefully, he laid his head on the back of the sofa beside Eliot's shoulder, looking more at Parker, whose eyes were starting to drift closed, than the screen in front of them. He felt the earbud he still wore dig in slightly, but he was used to that by now and it didn't bother him.

They'd never talked about it, the way they were always both on comms. In the beginning, Alec had seen it almost as a sort of experiment in post-modern living. He was a child of the computer age; of blogs and twitter and constant status updates. He was used to living in a world where everyone broadcast their every thought, every movement. It was interesting to know just how far he could push it, just how much he could share, and still sustain the concept of himself as an independent, discrete being. It hadn't been until after the Iowa job, when he'd seen first hand the way Eliot only seemed to relax when they were both on comms, that he'd stopped taking it out altogether, except for showers and sex.

It certainly wasn't an experiment any more. He felt like he could almost see the connection between them; ear to ear, mind to mind, heart to heart. The link was like an olive branch, or an umbilical cord. In the same way that Parker never held his hand, but always tucked a couple of carabiners, or a lock pick into his pocket before he went out 'just in case', Eliot might not be able to hug him without pushing him away, but they were always with each other, regardless.

He wasn't sure exactly what it meant to Eliot, but it meant a lot to him, that someone was willing to be 'with' him all of the time. Parker needed a lot of space, and he did his best to respect that. He knew that she was basically an introvert, and no amount of love could change the fact that being around people exhausted her. He was the opposite, like a flower that wilted without constant attention and validation. That was what he loved about the internet; at any time, day or night, he could find a hundred people willing to chat with him about any subject. He could crowd-source a social life, but he still wished that a little more of it was a bit closer to home.

He knew that Eliot would probably need a lot of space too, but wouldn't it be nice to have two people who loved him, two people he could go to when he needed to be with someone? Trying to balance his needs and Parker's had been more of a compromise than either of them was entirely happy with – Parker still spent too much time feeling crowded and agitated, and he spent too much time alone. Maybe with Eliot in the mix, the balance might work a bit better.

That was, if Eliot even wanted to be in the mix. That was his biggest fear; that Eliot would freak out when they spoke to him, and nothing would be the same afterwards. He wished he could talk to Sophie about it, since she was so good at reading people that she'd probably have been able to give him Eliot's answer without him even having to ask the question, but Sophie wasn't exactly a part of the team any more. She was still family, but this was something that was just for them, just for the three of them, and Alec Hardison, master of the over-share, found that this was something he wanted to keep private.

Parker was fast asleep on Eliot's shoulder when the film ended, and Alec knew he couldn't drag it out any more. He carried Parker off to bed, saying goodnight to Eliot as he went. He felt strange; no matter what happened tonight, he had a sense that this would be the last time that things were just like this. This would be the last time he could say 'goodnight' to Eliot and mean 'I love you', and be able to tell himself that Eliot didn't hear the words he hadn't said.

It should have been impossible for him to go to sleep, knowing that Parker was sat awake beside him, waiting to put their plan into action. He still wasn't happy with the plan, wasn't happy about needing a plan, but he knew he wasn't brave enough to just come out and say what he needed to in the light of day, so he went along with it. In the end though, it had been a week of too much stress and too little sleep, and he fell asleep even as he was thinking that there was no way he could.

Parker woke him up just before the door opened, though he kept his eyes shut and tried to stay still. They had agreed that Parker had a better chance of getting Eliot to stay, of putting him at his ease. They'd seen Eliot with women enough times to know that kind of affection was a familiar thing for him. Neither of them was sure how he'd have reacted if Hardison had been the one to try and bring him in.

He listened for all he was worth, trying to work out what was going on, but they were both so damn light on their feet, and the few words they whispered were so quiet they could have come from anywhere. It wasn't until he felt a weight settle on the bed, one too large to be Parker, that he began to think that this might work. Eliot was here now, and there was a very big part of Alec which was certain no one could climb into bed with Parker and want to leave.

The first properly audible words Eliot said were “I should go”, which didn't exactly bode well, but Alec had faith in his girl, his mastermind, so he stayed quiet and played his part.

“Why?” Parker asked.

“When Alec wakes up...” Eliot said. That was his cue. Hardison opened his eyes in time to see Eliot lift his arm to put a hand on Parker's hip. He'd worried so much about this, about how it might hurt to see them together, but they look so right together, and he doesn't feel sad, he doesn't feel hurt, or left out. He feels how he thinks Parker must feel, jumping off a building. Out of control, at the mercy of forces he can't change, but in the most wonderful way. He rolls over, so that his chest is just touching Eliot's back. Not too close, not enough to make the hitter feel trapped. He puts his hand lightly over Eliot's, his silent way of saying  _ _it's okay, man. You can touch her, if that's what you both want.__

“ _ _When__  Alec wakes up?” he asked, and his voice came out so soft that every word sounded like love, and it was too much, too fast, and he had to make a joke. That's what he does, after all, when things get too much. He makes a joke.

“You think I don't wake up when Parker invites some guy into bed with me? You're heavy, man, no way I ain't waking up when the bed practically collapses under you.”

“Some guy?” Eliot snaps, “and I ain't that heavy.”

“Besides,” Parker adds “it's not like I'd do this without Alec knowing about it. I know better than that.” Alec smirked, muttering under his breath, “you do  _ _now__ , “ before realising what he'd just accidentally implied. It had been part of a con, actually. One of those spur of the moment things that she hadn't had time to clue him in about. He was gratified that she'd trusted him to be able to pick up her cues and run with a grift, even at 5am in their hotel room, wearing nothing but his boxers, but they'd had a serious talk afterwards about how some things just shouldn't happen without advance warning.

“Not all surprises are good,” Parker says, using exactly the same intonation as he had when he'd drilled it into her. He smiled.

“Well,” Eliot said, and Alec could feel the tension starting to knot in his muscles “that sounds like my cue to leave.” He braced himself for rejection, waited for Eliot to throw off the arm Alec still had draped over him and leave, but he didn't, so after a moment, Alec felt brave enough to speak.

“Not all surprises are bad, either,” he said, as gently as he could. “You don't have to go.”

“You knew Parker was planning this?” Eliot asked.

“We both planned this.” He replied, and then, because he was nervous, and he always talked more than he should when he was nervous, “you think I wear that damn earbud all the time for my health? You snore, you know.” He was so used to the banter between them; the insults and jibes that would have hurt if they hadn't come from a place of deep trust and understanding, that accusing Eliot of snoring felt right somehow, even if it didn't exactly come from the grifters handbook of putting people at their ease.

He didn't actually mind the snoring, not really. He didn't have the preternatural senses that the rest of his team seemed to have; most of the time, the only time he heard anything from Eliot on his comms was while he was sleeping. It was soothing, and just as effective as the white-noise generators he used to run to help him sleep back before Nana let him have a computer in his room, and he'd started sleeping to the comforting thrum of processors and fans.

“So why do you wear it?” Eliot asked, and Alec didn't know how to respond. This was why they'd never talked about it; because what was there to say? There were so many reasons, and he picked one almost at random. A reason which said  _ _something,__ without saying  _ _everything.__

“You know the only time I've ever woken up before you? It was after the Iowa job. Remember?”

“I remember that I had a knife wound in my gut, and three broken ribs, and I hadn't slept in over 72 hours. I think I'm entitled to a little sleep after that.” Eliot really was feeling edgy, if he went straight on the defensive that way, and Alec had to backtrack to try and diffuse the sudden tension.

“Woah! Hey, not a dig, man. I'm just saying. We were all worn out after that job, and I forgot to take my comms out. I don't take them out much anyway, but I never used to sleep in them. That was the first time. And you slept for eight whole hours, like a normal person.”

“I still don't see what that has to do with anything.”

“The minute he took his earbud out,” Parker said softly, “you woke up.”

“So, you guys planned this? Lured me into your bed in the middle of the night, and for what? Huh? Why am I here? I don't like being manipulated.” That. That was it right there, the reason that Alec hadn't been sure about this whole idea from the start. But what had they been supposed to do? Neither of them was the kind of person who could just come out and say, “hey man, we think we might have fallen in love with you. So how would you feel about making this a three-way thing?” Not a chance. The option they'd gone with, well, it seemed easier, before, but Hardison could see it falling apart on them. When Parker spoke, he could tell she knew they'd messed up.

“I'm sorry,” she said, “it was my idea to get you here. There are things I wanted to say, but they were all impossible things. Things too fragile to let out in the daylight.”

“Sometimes it's easier to talk like this,” Alec continued, trying to put in his tone how sorry they were, how they hadn't meant to hurt him, “curled up in the dark as though everything is a dream, and nothing can hurt you.”  _ _Except us,__ he thought.

“But you can leave if you want,” Parker said, “if you don't want to be here... if you don't feel safe... you don't have to stay.”

Eliot didn't leave. Alec felt the shift of muscles in Eliot's body as he prepared to flee. Felt, as well, the moment when that tension dissipated, and he decided to stay. He knew just how close they'd come to screwing this up irrevocably.

He took a deep breath, thinking hard before talking again. He knew he had to get this just right, but when he opened his mouth, he just couldn't find the words he needed.

“We've been talking a lot about... things,” he said, “and we've wondered for a while whether you... well, whether we...” he trailed off, clenching his jaw in frustration.

“We've had an idea for a while that you might rather be here,” Parker continued, when it was obvious that he couldn't, “than where you were, but we didn't know how to ask. We didn't want you to feel like you didn't have a choice.”

“We need you to know how important you are to us,” Alec said, remembering the words they'd practised, now that Parker had gotten the ball rolling for him. “We want you with us, in this team. We're friends before anything, and nothing is going to change that.”

“She threw a crowbar at my head,” Eliot said, finally speaking “if I stuck around after that, then you're not getting rid of me that easily.” It took a moment for Hardison to realise that Eliot was trying to joke, since he'd been braced for accusations, recriminations, anything but a joke. He laughed, but knew it sounded forced.

“We love you,” Parker said, skipping, like, half of the script they'd worked out. But he trusted her instincts, so he didn't try to interrupt. “We love you, and that's ours. We get that. We can love you, and it doesn't have to change anything. You don't even have to love us back. Love is just a thing. It's just...” Parker sighed, and he could tell she was struggling for words. They'd worked on that a lot, these past years, teaching Parker the value of using her words, but it still didn't come easily to her. Still, that's why they were a team; if there was something Parker couldn't do, then he would damn well find a way to do it for her, knowing that she'd do the same for him.

“What she's trying to say is that love is a great thing, but when it comes with expectations, people get hurt, and we don't want to hurt you. So no expectations, no demands. You can get up and walk away and never see us again, and we won't try to stop you. It's your choice. Or you can go back to your bed and go to sleep, and we'll never have to talk about this again. Things can be the way they always have. Us loving you won't change that.” It hurt, it really hurt, saying that they'd let Eliot go. It was the truth; if he really wanted to go, there was nothing they could do to stop him, and even if there was, they wouldn't do it. But it would hurt, if he went, hurt more than Alec wanted to contemplate.

“How do you know it won't?”

“Because we've loved you for a long time, man, and it hasn't changed things yet.” There. He said it. They loved Eliot. He loved Eliot. After all this time, he'd said it, and it was too late to take it back. There was a freedom in that. All his cards were on the table now.

“And what if I don't?” Eliot asked.

“Don't what?”

“Walk away.”


	4. Together

“And what if I don't?” Eliot asked.

“Don't what?”

“Walk away.”

There was a moment of silence. Eliot had half-hoped that would be enough, that he could take the tiniest of steps towards them, and they'd be there to meet him, but he knew it wouldn't happen. They were all lost here, all vulnerable. They'd put their cards on the table, and fine, so maybe it wasn't as bad for them; if this all went wrong, they still had each other, He still knew it couldn't have been easy. They'd done their part; they'd put themselves out there. Now it was time for the retrieval specialist to bring them home.

“I don't do monogamy,” he said, launching into the spiel he'd given a thousand times, about how he couldn't bear to be tied down to just one person, just one place, about how he went crazy without his freedom, and then stopped at the laugh which came from either side of him.

“What?” he asked

“Monogamy?” Parker giggled. “Not really an option here.” Damn, she was right about that much. He couldn't give them the usual talk; not only because this wasn't just one person he was dealing with, but because he truly loved these two. He might not be able to stay with them all the time – settling down wasn't in his nature – but he knew he'd always come back to them.

“Fidelity then,” he amended. “It just ain't something I do. And this isn't some commitment issue, or anything like that. I'm committed to the... team. And that's for keeps.” The _team_. That was one hell of a euphemism. He was normally so good at being blunt, and just saying what needed to be said, but this whole situation had thrown him off balance. “It's just the way I am. I can't live on... pretzels. Okay? No matter how much I love... pretzels, sometimes I need chips, or breadsticks, or some damn fruit.” Euphemisms again, or mostly euphemisms. He meant the thing about the fruit. How could they live on all that processed crap they ate? He wondered if he'd been wrong to say the thing about the pretzels. Was that supposed to be something just for them? But neither of them seemed to mind.

“But,” Parker said, sounding small and vulnerable again, “you do want the... pretzels? Because we've got plenty. More than enough for three.”

“Which is her way of saying 'too many for two'. Seriously man. Save us from ourselves. You know you want to.” Eliot would have known Alec was kidding, even without Parker's laugh. After all, these two, well, they were the last thing he'd ever want to be saved from.

“You don't mind me seeing other... snacks?” He had to know. He had to know if they could accept him on his own terms. He knew from bitter experience that if he tried to pretend that he was something he wasn't, it would only end up hurting them all.

“Hey man,” Alec said, “we're trying to give you something here, not take something away. We're thieves and crooks. We know that rules are made to be broken, and not just law-type rules. Relationship rules as well. Who cares what other people think? We just need to find what works for us.”

“We'll make it work,” Parker said, and she sounded so certain that they both found that they believed her.

 

***

 

The rest of the night was all soft words and wandering hands, the three of them basking in the glow of loving and being loved. It was dawn before any of them started yawning, and – miracle of miracles – it was Eliot who fell asleep first, though Hardison knew that he and Parker weren't far behind.

“Hey Alec,” Parker said, just as they were falling asleep, “I think we stole ourselves an Eliot.”

**Author's Note:**

> So, this is the first thing I've posted, and it's entirely un-beta'd. Feedback is more than welcome, and thank you for reading :)


End file.
